Shimon Peres, the Israeli leader and Nobel Prize-winning peacemaker who coined the phrase “the new Middle East”, has died at the age of 93 with the region still sadly reminiscent of the old one.
One of Israel’s longest-serving public officials, he was prime minister, foreign minister and president at different times and played a role in the country’s history from before its founding. He will be best remembered as a father of the Oslo accords, the blueprint that was meant to create a Palestinian state.
Peres’ vision of a brighter future for the region was shattered during his later years, when the Israeli-Palestinian peace process floundered amid the violence of the second Palestinian intifada; hopes for a two-state solution all but vanished. He grew increasingly disillusioned that the prospects for peace had slipped away under successive hardline governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the rightwing prime minister who defeated him and his Labour party at the polls in 1996 and went on to serve four terms in office.